Something beautiful I once knew

The first thing I did on arrival in New York the other day was go out and buy the new Ezra Pound, that is to say, the Library of America's new edition of Poems and Translations. The Library of America series, begun almost a quarter of a century ago, was founded as an equivalent to the French Pléiade editions. These are scholarly but affordable versions of classic American texts (the new Pound costs $45), printed on thin paper of high quality, which pack more than 1,000 pages into one volume. The original impulse for the series came from Edmund Wilson.

About 140 titles have been published, mostly prose works of all kinds - novels, sermons, speeches, journalism (the website is www.loa.org). In poetry, the key volumes to date are Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. One might add Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein and Henry David Thoreau, together with a selected Longfellow. Then there is a huge anthology of poetry, in four volumes, which has its uses, especially as a place to locate historically interesting but perhaps somewhat obscure authors. But the exemplary Whitman, Frost and Stevens collections are the ones to which the general reader of poetry is most likely to want to turn.

What about the new Pound? An alternative title for it might be "Everything except the Cantos" - everything in poetry, that is (one hardly likes to inquire how much prose of one sort or another is there for the collecting). Included among the translations are two volumes of Confucius, together with the "Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius", the Noh plays, two versions of Sophocles and the poems of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel.

That's an amazing amount of poetry of various kinds, and one hasn't begun to enumerate Pound's own collections, which begin with Hilda's Book, a unique, handbound volume made by Pound for his girlfriend Hilda Doolittle in 1907, the year before A Lume Spento, his first collection (but published in a small edition at his own expense). Looking at Pound's early volumes now, it occurs to me that they are as far away from us in time as the poetry of the Romantics was to Pound when he began as a poet.

It was a complete surprise, when I began reading Pound as a teenager, to find that the poet after Eliot most associated with modernism wrote in such an antiquated style. That was because the volumes of Pound I was taking out of the library were first editions of the early collections (the library in question seemed indifferent to their value), and Pound did indeed begin work as a poet somewhere in the linguistic region of Wardour Street. ("Wardour Street" means bogus antique language, because Wardour Street itself used to be full of shops selling bogus antique furniture. The expression had nothing to do with the film industry, although the kind of language used in the old epic films is a very good example of Wardour Street.)

It is also true that when you translate a medieval poet such as Cavalcanti you find yourself in dire need of antiquated expressions to represent antique thoughts. When rendering the troubadour Arnault Daniel into English, Pound came across a copy of Gavin Douglas's "The XIII Bukes of Enneados", a Middle Scots version of Virgil dated 1553. Richard Sieburth, the editor of the new volume, kindly provides us with a glossary of Pound's Middle Scots archaisms, from which we learn that "galzeardy" means cheerfulness, a "swevyn" is a dream, "wriblis" are warblings and "shaveling" is "a contemptuous epithet for a tonsured ecclesiastic". This help is well worth having.

Pound, who died in Venice 31 years ago today, always caused divisions among poets, and (as is sometimes the case) his most passionate adherents were not always the best friends of his reputation. What will happen to that reputation in the future is to me one of the hardest things to guess. Pound will always be significant, in the sense that in order to understand the history of 20th-century poetry one will need to know who he was and what he did. But whether poets will feel ignorant for not having yet read "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" I simply cannot tell. It was never my favourite poem.

I have the warmest feelings towards Pound, thinking of him as a great teacher and a campaigner for his enthusiasms, an original reader in the works of the past, an artist blessed with a rare character that took great delight in the successes of his peers. And I must really like him a lot for I seem perfectly prepared to section off that aspect of his work that was fascistic, anti-semitic and plain crazy. Perhaps it is possible to forgive the foul politics because it was so disinterestedly crazy. It was self-destructive rather than self-advancing.

Cutting the wrapper off the new Pound, taking a first look at what is there, falling jet-lagged asleep over the new Pound, waking up to the strange sounds of New York central heating with the new Pound in my hand, finding something beautiful I once knew, finding things I never knew, giving "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" another chance, wondering if I will ever read "Confucius: The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot" - such have been the pleasures of the week. Take the book at a sane pace, is my advice. It seems very well done, so why spoil the pleasure?